Friday’s Headlines: The Most Awesome Economist Job Ever

The Wall Street Journal did well with this clever headline, referencing a job opening for someone to help a gaming company with “the virtual economies of video games.”

The gig, at Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Corp, will help develop virtual worlds, following past experience of economists who have taken lessons from Second Life. The story quotes from the job listing on the company site:

[We seek an economist to] provide insight into short- and long-term behavioral patterns of participants in virtual economies. These economies are replete with rich trading patterns, fascinating ‘institutions’ (which have also sprung up organically), socio-economic conventions, and, generally, a host of economic phenomena that partly reflect what we observe in the analog world and partly constitute new and unexplored behavioral patterns.

Valve has hired a couple of economists in recent years. Explains one: “Economic decision-making is so fundamental to what we’re doing. There is a massive digital economy, with millions of goods being traded. Our background is in making cool video games, not in economics… we realized there had to be someone out there who could help us do this analysis.”

 

Other News:

Moody’s cut the credit ratings of 15 large financial firms. [NY Times]

Deep ratings at Morgan Stanley mean psychological problems. [DealBook]

Investment firms are getting a piece of Russia. [Reuters]

AIG docked the pay of CEO Henri Courpron for having a personal relationship with an employee. [Dow Jones]

Investors keep fleeing the market. [CNN Money]

FINRA fined BofA/ML $2.8 million for overcharging 95,000 customers $32 million. [Investment News]

Discount brokerages are crying foul over new requirements for higher deposits required to back stock and options trades. [WSJ]